Scientists in Bangladesh are working on ways to treat toilet waste in rural areas and use it to develop safe, nutritious compost for food crops. Led by the school of civil engineering at Leeds University, the Value at the End of the Sanitation Value-Chain (VESV) project aims to help reduce reliance on imported inorganic fertilisers and provide potential business opportunities for waste transporters and compost producers in a country where access to sanitation is now widespread but challenges of managing waste remain.

Farmers tend their cabbage crops in Manikganj district. Bangladesh has benefited from major improvements in rural sanitation with the spread of pit toilets – holes dug in the ground.

These bypass the problem of installing sewerage infrastructure in densely populated rural areas, but the challenge is what to do with the waste when the pits are full. If treated carefully, this waste could provide a local source of organic matter and plant nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. All photographs by Neil Palmer/IWMI.

To identify household-level factors associated with influenza among young children in a crowded community in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Case households were more likely than controls to have crowded (≥4 persons) sleeping areas and cross-ventilated cooking spaces. Case and control households had similar median 24-hour geometric mean PM2.5 concentrations in the cooking and sleeping spaces. Handwashing with soap was practiced infrequently, and was not associated with pediatric influenza in this community. Interventions aimed at crowded households may reduce influenza incidence in young children.

Getting the basic rights – the role of water, sanitation and hygiene in maternal and reproductive health: a conceptual framework. (Full text)
WASH affects the risk of adverse maternal and perinatal health outcomes; these exposures are multiple and overlapping and may be distant from the immediate health outcome. Much of the evidence is weak, based on observational studies and anecdotal evidence, with relatively few systematic reviews. New systematic reviews are required to assess the quality of existing evidence more rigorously, and primary research is required to investigate the magnitude of effects of particular WASH exposures on specific maternal and perinatal outcomes.

LANCET INFECTIOUS DISEASES – FEB 2015

Editorial – Prioritising clean water and sanitation (Free full text but registration required)
Sanitation is the single greatest human achievement with regard to health, yet in much of the world it is underappreciated or inaccessible. Talha Burki investigates. “Currently, the popular approaches to sanitation place a lot of responsibility on individuals and households and not as much on governments”, adds WaterAid’s Yael Velleman. In the UK, it was legislation that led to universal access to improved sanitation. “Ultimately, it was political will and public finance that pushed that drive—I wonder whether we now expect low-income countries to do something we have never done ourselves”, said Velleman. Pollock advocates a return to a health-for-all approach, attending to the building blocks of public health, such as sanitation and nutrition, and directing major investment into infrastructure and monitoring systems. “I can’t understand why we’re prioritising clinical trials in Africa, and not prioritising clean water”, she told The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

An excerpt – I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

The occasion was a tour of a facility that burns human waste and produces water and electricity (plus a little ash). I have visited lots of similar sites, like power plants and paper mills, so when I heard about this one—it’s part of the Gates Foundation’s effort to improve sanitation in poor countries—I was eager to check it out.

Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity?

Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren’t properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.

In Sub-Saharan Africa sanitation needs of the majority of the urban population are met by onsite sanitation technologies such as pit latrines. As part of the SPLASH sanitation research programme the FaME (Faecal Management Enterprises) and U-ACT Project researched innovative solutions to increase access to sustainable sanitation services. Building on this research Sandec/Eawag has recently started the SEEK Project (Sludge to Energy Enterprises) researching co-processing of faecal sludge and other urban waste streams into fuel pellets and with these electricity through gasification.

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Published on Sep 12, 2014 -“Behind The Data: The People Who Make Research Happen” is a short documentary, highlighting the work that was done in rural communities by the people who were instrumental in collecting and recording data for a sanitation-based research project. We aim to show the fundamental value of each person’s role in achieving the ultimate research objectives.

Abstract: Methods to assess household excreta disposal practices are critical for informing public health outcomes of efforts to improve sanitation in developing countries. We present a new metric, the Safe San Index (SSI), to quantify the hygienic safety of a household’s defecation and human feces disposal practices in India, where behavioral outcomes from on-going public expenditures to construct household sanitation facilities and eliminate open defecation are poorly measured. We define hygienic safety of feces disposal as capture in a hygienic sanitation facility.

The SSI consists of 15 self-report items and two sub-scales, Latrine Use Frequency and Seven-Day Open Defecation Rate. Households are scored on a standardized scale from 0 (no defecation safely captured) to 100 (all defecation safely captured). We present results of a pilot study in Odisha, India to apply the Index to assess excreta disposal behaviors among rural households and evaluate the reliability and validity of the Index for estimating the rate of correct and consistent sanitation facility usage of household with an improved latrine.

The iDE Sanitation Marketing Scale Up (SMSU) project operates in seven Cambodian provinces. It started with a pilot project in 2009 and scaling-up began in September 2011. So far total latrine sales including the pilot is 118,000.

The average latrine coverage in the seven provinces where the project is taking place inceased by 11% to 40% over the two years since scale up began. Coverage for the poor increased 6% overall. In Kandal province alone, 18% of project-linked sales went to poor households, nearly doubling poor coverage in that province from 15% to 29%.

The three-year SMSU project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Stone Family Foundation, and technically supported by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank. The project is supported by the Ministry of Rural Development.

For every latrine sold through a small business trained by iDE, another latrine is sold through a non-connected business, creating a ripple effect. The average latrine sells for US$ 41.50.

Dear SUSANA colleagues, I would like to forward this newsletter of the NGO ‘Children Without Worms', where the current discussion on mass deworming is addressed. Best regards Bella Bella Monse GIZ Philippines Link to the newsletter: www.childrenwithoutworms.org/quarterly-dose First image of newsletter: Begin forwarded message: (note by moderator: the ne […]

Dear Graham, I think the BSF (black soldier fly) would not be grown inside of the pit but at an external place as it needs rather controlled conditions, and probably more oxygen than what would be available inside of the pit. Or perhaps I misunderstood your question? Regards, Elisabeth

Hi Eng. Mughal I very well agree with your observations. Tahunganh needs some assistance in substance. As far as I know, Dr. Barbara Senkwe PhD of USAID SUWASA has done such work in the South Sudan but I doubt if she is still available on her email address at bsenkwe@ard-suwasa.org as the project is winding up soon. We featured her article ‘An Emerging Fecal […]

Hi Virginia Thanks for your important work you are doing in Madagascar. The country was in focus in March this year as its president Mr. Hery Rajaonarimampianina became the first Chief of State in the world to sign a pledge in public to end open defecation. We presented a short mention of this in our Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene May-June 2015 editi […]

Hi Kris Thank you very much for your thoughts. We agree with your concerns. That's why we have given so much importance to develop the protocol so easy and cost effective which can potentially be done at the local level. However, phage therapy has been successful to treat diarrhoeal infection in human gut which is as complex as waste water system. Moreo […]

Integration of Nutrition and WaSH programmes was the key topic discussed at the multi sectorial panel seminar hosted by Irish Aid, the IFGH and the Development Studies Association of Ireland on the 19th May.

Sustainability is without doubt one of the most burning subject matters that subsumes many of the issues that we are seeing in CLTS and wider WASH practice.On Wednesday 24th June, from 14.00-15.30 BST (convert to your time zone here), the CLTS Knowledge Hub will offer a webinar on the subject.

Over 50 female leaders from around the world recently published a declaration calling for the end of poor sanitation and hygiene in the developing world. Among those leaders are the first ladies of Madagascar and Malawi, both of whom announced the declaration in Washington, D.C.